Matt's Homepage

RCLifeOn created a 2D drawing lightbox from an old 3D printer, a marker, and some LED lights to draw patterns on acrylic. Even more interesting, he did it live on Twitch.

Like many creators, they’re finding a tremendous amount of free software to complete projects without needing to invest long hours developing their own software. They’re creating increasingly more amazing stuff from off the shelf parts.

Some of his software tools:

• Autodesk Fusion 360 for drawing up the 3D parts he needed
• Sandify is an open source java package that creates patterns/paths for robots to draw in sand (continuous lines without lifting, etc)
  • https://github.com/jeffeb3/sandify

The Backrooms is an internet creepypasta that got started in 2019. A simple post and picture on 4chan caught fire. It became stories, then a video game, then lots of video games. Then, it became live short videos that use lots of VCR like 80’s video quality effects.

Andy R Animations shows how he used free versions of Blender and Davinci to create some of the higher quality Backrooms videos. Definitely worth a look at the amazing things people can generate now using free tools.

Epic games worked with Quixel and just release the photogrammetry app RealityScan which turns smartphone photos into high-fidelity 3D models. The app is called RealityScan and is a paired down version of the desktop version of RealityCapture. Both combine a set of 2D images to make 3D assets. The idea is to enable game developers and other creatives to scan real-world objects at any time and any place for their projects (or the MetaVerse if that becomes a thing).

Engadget tried the iPhone app out and shows us how it works.

The scanning process begins with signing into your Epic Games account and taking at least 20 photos of an object from all sides. As you move your phone around, a real-time quality map shows how well you’ve covered it: green denotes well-covered areas, yellow could use more attention and red needs the most additional photos.

The app uploads and automatically aligns the images in the cloud as you take the photos. You can preview the model through the camera view and switch between the quality map and an in-progress, full-color render. When you want to crop it, it pops up 3D handles for you to drag around, ensuring it captures only the item, not the floor beneath it or background objects.

The process works best with simple items captured in even, indirect lighting (reflective or wet surfaces won’t capture well). It also appears to work best with larger objects, as my attempt to capture a small Mr. T action figure resulted in something that looks more like a pointillistic painting than a usable model.

The iPhone App version hasn’t got very good reviews (2.2 stars) – but it’s a start.

This idea isn’t new. There has been research and experiments in this space since the early 2000’s; but it’s an interesting attempt even if it seems to have a lot of growing pains to work out.

• 2021 – 2D images into navigable, photorealistic 3D worlds in minutes

Karolina Żebrowska knows a ton about historical clothes. Sadly, she has to put up with largely ignorant modern period showmakers who make incorrect accusations about sexism of women’s fashions from the past. Here she re-enacts what happens when writers/self-styled designers try to bully experts like Karolina by (as one person put it) ‘basically wanting to produce a slightly altered fanfic they wrote when they were 13.’

Definitely check out her other videos on how modern sensibilities, including many modern gender commentators, actually get what was going on in the past completely wrong. But can you blame them? After all, almost none of those gender and similar degrees actually study the actual history, design, or the societies they are denouncing. They just study the criticisms of them.